The Plight of Undocumented Workers in the U.S.

The third book in the Voice of Witness series is well underway. Acclaimed writer Peter Orner, his students from San Francisco State University, and a handful of talented journalists and filmmakers are gathering interviews with undocumented workers from around the country. We've divided the interviews by profession, covering a wide range of industries from agriculture to domestic work. Our goal is to simultaneously demonstrate how vital illegal immigrants have become to the American economy, and the hardships they endure to remain here.

A number of professors, lawyers, journalists, and immigrants-rights advocates have agreed to join a panel of expert consultants. They are helping us identify the major issues facing undocumented workers, and the people whose stories best depict these issues.

The interview process itself is proving to be different than anything we've done before. As a policy, the narrators of our books are involved in every step of the process, and their approval is our first benchmark. In this case, we're showing great caution when it comes to the privacy of the interviewees, many of whom fear legal ramifications if they tell their stories. Therefore, they decide whether or not they want to remain anonymous. They have control over whether or not their interviews are published, and are consulted during each stage of editing.

Translation has been another challenging part of the interviews. Many of our interviewees don't speak English as a primary language, so we're employing the help of translators, and bilingual interviewers. (If you are interested in helping out with transcription or translation, please click here). Our most pressing task is demonstrating that the human stories these immigrants have to tell transcend language and geographical or cultural borders.

Undocumented workers work for next to nothing, and fulfill the most difficult demands our society and economy create. They toil as meat packers, Christmas tree farmers, nannies, maids, farmers, and day laborers. The government often looks the other way and allows undocumented workers to function unchecked. Yet, by no means is this an act of magnanimity. By looking the other way, we also ignore the privation and hardship immigrants suffer. By coming here illegally, they exist outside the law, and thus are not afforded its protections.

Moreover, when the government does crack down on illegal immigrants, it leaves a wake of separate human-rights nightmares in its wake. A recent series of raids on companies employing illegal immigrants has left thousands of children orphaned as their parents are taken to detention centers and prepared for deportation.

The New York Times recently reported that a 2006 law (under the circumlocutory title, the Deficit Reduction Act), aimed at cutting off illegal immigrants benefiting from Medicaid, has had the side effect of depriving qualified citizens from receiving medical care. Thousands of Americans in Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio, and Virginia--in addition to countless illegal immigrants--are being deprived of proper medical care under the auspices of reducing the national deficit.

The American government's failure to recognize undocumented workers is a substantial problem, one that affects us all in one way or another. Our goal is to examine its effects head-on, shedding light on the grave human consequences created by looking the other way.